Quotes from A.W. Tozer

Quotes by A. W. Tozer

Appearances
I say that a Christian congregation can survive and often appear to prosper in the community by the exercise of human talent and without any touch from the Holy Spirit! All that religious activity and the dear people will not know anything better until the great and terrible day when our self-employed talents are burned with fire and only that which was wrought by the Holy Ghost will stand forever!

Bored?
Man is bored, because he is too big to be happy with that which sin is giving him. God has made him too great, his potential is too mighty."

Character
"Whatever a man wants badly and persistently enough will determine the man’s character."

Complacency
"Complacency is the deadly enemy of spiritual progress. The contented soul is the stagnant soul."

Conduct
"We modern Christians are long on talk and short on conduct."

Content
"The average Christian is so cold and so contented with His wretched condition that there is no vacuum of desire into which the blessed Spirit can rush in satisfying fullness."

Cross
"We must do something about the cross, and one of two things only we can do--flee it or die upon it."

Devotional Life (distractions)
"Modern civilization is so complex as to make the devotional life all but impossible. It wears us out by multiplying distractions and beats us down by destroying our solitude, where otherwise we might drink and renew our strength before going out to face the world again."

Discipleship
"The New Christian is like a man who has learned to drive a car in a country where the traffic moves on the left side of the highway and suddenly finds himself in another country and forced to drive on the right. He must unlearn his old habit and learn a new one and more serious than all, he must learn in heavy traffic."

Embarrassed
"Many of us Christians have become extremely skillful in arranging our lives so as to admit the truth of Christianity without being embarrassed by its implications. We arrange things so that we can get on well enough without divine aid, while at the same time ostensibly seeking it. We boast in the Lord but watch carefully that we never get caught depending on Him."

Failure
"No man is worthy to succeed until he is willing to fail. No man is morally worthy of success in religious activities until he is willing that the honor of succeeding should go to another if God so wills. God may allow His servant to succeed when He has disciplined him to a point where he does not need to succeed to be happy."

Faith
"In the Book of Acts faith was for each believer a beginning, not an end; it was a journey, not a bed in which to lie while waiting for the day of our Lord’s triumph. Believing was not a once-done act; it was more than an act, it was an attitude of heart and mind which inspired and enabled the believer to take up his cross and follow the Lamb whithersoever He went."

"Faith never means gullibility. The man who believes everything is as far from God as the man who refuses to believe anything."

’...Faith is not a once-done act, but a continuous gaze of the heart at the Triune God. Believing, then, is directing the hearts’ attention to Jesus. It is lifting the mind to "behold the Lamb of God," and never ceasing that beholding for the rest of our lives.’

Faith as Paul saw it, was a living flaming thing leading to surrender and obedience to the commandments of Christ. Faith in our day often means no more than a meek assent to a doctrine.

Faith and Obedience
In the New Testament there is no contradiction between faith and obedience. Between faith and law-works, yes; between law and grace, yes; but between faith and obedience, not at all. The Bible recognizes no faith that does not lead to obedience, nor does it recognize any obedience that does not spring from faith.

Fear
The only fear I have is to fear to get out of the will of God. Outside of the will of God, there’s nothing I want, and in the will of God there’s nothing I fear, for God has sworn to keep me in His will. If I’m out of his will that’s another matter. But if I’m in His will, He’s sworn to keep me."

Fear of God
The greatness of God rouses fear within us, but His goodness encourages us not to be afraid of Him. To fear and not be afraid--that is the paradox of faith.

Foolishness
"The notion that the careless sinner is the smart fellow and the serious-minded Christian, though well-intentioned, is a stupid dolt altogether out of touch with life will not stand up under scrutiny. Sin is basically an act of moral folly, and the greater the folly the greater the fool."

Forgiveness
"The idea that God will pardon a rebel who has not given up his rebellion is contrary both to the Scriptures and to common sense."

Future
"We must face today as children of tomorrow. We must meet the uncertainties of this world with the certainty of the world to come."

God
"We are called to an everlasting preoccupation with God."

"It is impossible to keep our moral practices sound and our inward attitudes right while our idea of God is erroneous or inadequate."

Much of our difficulty as seeking Christians stems from our unwillingness to take God as He is and adjust our lives accordingly. We insist upon trying to modify Him and to bring Him nearer to our own image.

"What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us."

God-centered or Man-centered?
"Christianity today is man-centered, not God-centered. God is made to wait patiently, even respectfully, on the whims of men. The image of God currently popular is that of a distracted Father, struggling in heartbroken desperation to get people to accept a Saviour of whom they feel no need and in whom they have very little interest. To persuade these self-sufficent souls to respond to His generous offers God will do almost anything, even using salesmanship methods and talking down to them in the chummiest way imaginable. This view of things is, of course, a kind of religious romanticism which, while it often uses flattering and sometimes embarrasing terms in praise of God, manages nevertheless to make man the star of the show.

Grace
Nobody ever got anything from God on the grounds that he deserved it. Haven fallen, man deserves only punishment and death. So if God answers prayer it’s because God is good. From His goodness, His lovingkindness, His good-natured benevolence, God does it! That’s the source of everything.

Holiness
"Every man is as holy as he really wants to be."

"What does this word holiness really mean? Is it a negative kind of piety from which so many people have shied away? No, of course not! Holiness in the Bible means moral wholeness-- a positive quality which actually includes kindness, mercy, purity, moral blamelessness and godliness. It is always to be thought of in a positive, white intensity of degree."

Holiness of God
"We cannot grasp the true meaning of the divine holiness by thinking of someone or something very pure and then raising the concept to the highest degree we are capable of. God’s holiness is not simply the best we know infinitely bettered. We know nothing like the divine holiness. It stands apart, unique, unapproachable, incomprehensible and unattainable. The natural man is blind to it. He may fear God’s power and admire His wisdom, but His holiness he cannot even imagine."

Hymnal
"After the Bible the next most valuable book for the Christian is a good hymnal. Let any young Christian spend a year prayerfully meditating on the hymns of Watts and Wesley alone and he will become a fine theologian. Then let him read a balanced diet of the Puritans and the Christian mystics. The results will be more wonderful than he could have dreamed."

Important people?
"I Thank God that the kingdom of God is not divided into areas for big, important people and areas for little, unimportant people. Every one is just as needful in God’s sight as any other!"

Intimacy with God
God formed us for His pleasure, and so formed us that we as well as He can in divine communion enjoy the sweet and mysterious mingling of kindred personalities. He meant us to see Him and live with Him and draw our life from His smile.

Judgement
"I think that most Christians would be better pleased if the Lord did not inquire into their personal affairs too closely. They want Him to save them, keep them happy and take them to heaven at last, but not to be too inquisitive about their conduct or service. But He has searched us and known us; He knows our downsitting and our uprising and understands our thoughts afar off. There is no place to hide from those eyes that are as a flame of fire and there is no way to escape from the Judgment of those feet that are like fine brass. It is the part of wisdom to live with these things in mind."

Knowing God
"If God is the Supreme good then our highest blessedness on earth must lie in knowing Him as perfectly as possible."

Leadership
History will show that the church has prospered most when blessed with strong leaders and suffered the greatest decline when her leaders were weak and time serving. The sheep rarely go much farther than the shepherd.

Listening to God
"When I am praying the most eloquently, I am getting the least accomplished in my prayer life. But when I stop getting eloquent and give God less theology and shut up and just gaze upward and wait for God to speak to my heart He speaks with such power that I have to grab a pencil and a notebook and take notes on what God is saying to my heart."

Narrow minded
"One of the Most stinging criticisms made against Christians is that their minds are narrow and their hearts small."

Negative Thinking
"Too many of our religious convictions are negative. We act not from a positive conviction that something is right, but from a feeling that the opposite is wrong."

Obedience
"The man that believes will obey; failure to obey is convincing proof that there is no true faith present. To attempt the impossible God must give faith or there will be none, and He gives faith to the obedient heart only."

Let a man set his heart only on doing the will of God and he is instantly free. No one can hinder him.

Poor in Spirit
"The way to deeper knowledge of God is through the lonely valleys of soul poverty and abnegation of all things. The blessed ones who possess the Kingdom are they who have repudiated every external thing and have rooted from their hearts all sense of possessing. These are the ’poor in spirit’"

Potential
"I find that many men and women are troubled by the thought that they are too small and inconsequential in the scheme of things. But that is not our real trouble -- we are actually too big and too complex, for God made us in His image and we are too big to be satisfied with what the world offers us!

....Man is bored, because he is too big to be happy with that which sin is giving him. God has made him too great, his potential is too mighty."

"When our Lord looked at us, He saw not only what we were -- He was faithful in seeing what we could become! He took away the curse of being and gave us the glorious blessing of becoming.

Prayer
All things being equal, our prayers are only as powerful as our lives. In the long pull we pray only as well as we live. Some prayers are like a fire escape, used only in times of critical emergency -- never very enjoyable, but used as a way of terrified escape from disaster. They do not represent the regular life of the one who offers them; rather are the unusual and uncommon acts of the spiritual amateur.

"Prayer is never an acceptable substitute for obedience. The sovereign Lord accepts no offering from His creatures that is not accompanied by obedience. To pray for revival while ignoring or actually flouting the plain precept laid down in the Scriptures is to waste a lot of words and get nothing for our trouble."

"When I am praying the most eloquently, I am getting the least accomplished in my prayer life. But when I stop getting eloquent and give God less theology and shut up and just gaze upward and wait for God to speak to my heart He speaks with such power that I have to grab a pencil and a notebook and take notes on what God is saying to my heart."

Pursuit of God
"Our pursuit of God is successful just because He is forever seeking to manifest Himself to us." To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul’s paradox of love, scorned indeed by the too-easily-satisfied religionist, but justified in happy experience by the children of the burning heart.

Quality of Christianity
"We need to improve the quality of our Christianity and we never will until we raise our concept of God back to that held by apostle, sage, prophet, saint and reformer. When we put God back where he really belongs, we will instinctively and automatically move up again; the whole spiral of our religious direction will be upward."

Secular or Sacred?
"It is not what a man does that determines whether his work is sacred or secular, it is why he does it. The motive is everything."

Seeking God
"God being who He is must always be sought for Himself, never as a means toward something else."

"Whoever seeks God as a means toward desired ends will not find God. The mighty God, the maker of heaven and earth, will not be one of many treasures, not even the chief of all treasures. He will be all in all or He will be nothing. God will not be used." The yearning to know What cannot be known, to comprehend the Incomprehensible, to touch and taste the Unapproachable, arises from the image of God in the nature of man. Deep calleth unto deep, and though polluted and landlocked by the mighty disaster theologians call the Fall, the soul senses its origin and longs to return to its Source.

Simplicity
"We Christians must simplify our lives or lose untold treasures on earth and in eternity."

Sin
"The abuse of a harmless thing is the essence of sin."

Sovereignty of God
"The notion that hostile persons or unfavorable circumstances can prevent the will of God from being fulfilled in a human life is altogether erroneous. Nothing, no one, can hinder God or a good man."

Spirituality
We may as well face it: the whole level of spirituality among us is low. We have measured ourselves by ourselves until the incentive to seek higher plateaus in the things of the Spirit is all but gone."

Spiritual Warfare
"The Christian is a Holy rebel loose in the world with access to the throne of God. Satan never knows from where the danger will come."

Time (from God’s perspective)
"God dwells in eternity but time dwells in God. He has already lived all our tomorrows as He has lived all our yesterdays."

"God never hurries. There are no deadlines against which He must work."

Trouble
"To be right with God has often meant to be in trouble with men."

Truth
"Truth is a glorious but hard mistress. She never consults, bargains or compromises."

Truth (Application Necessary)
For a long time I have believed that truth, to be understood must be lived; that Bible doctrine is wholly ineffective until it has been digested and assimilated by the total life.

"There is scarcely anything so dull and meaningless as Bible doctrine taught for its own sake. Truth divorced from life is not truth in its Biblical sense, but something else and something less."

Wasting our Lives
Actually, I do find Christians these days who seem to have largely wasted their lives. They were converted to Christ but they have never sought to go on to an increasing knowledge of God. There is untold loss and failure because they have accepted the whole level of things around them as being normal and desirable.

Wisdom of God
"Wisdom, among other things, is the the ability to devise perfect ends and to achieve those ends by the most perfect means....All God’s acts are done in perfect wisdom, first for His own glory, and then for the highest good of the greatest number for the longest time. And all His acts are as pure as they are wise, and as good as they are wise and pure. Not only could His acts not be better done: a better way to do them could not be imagined."

Work of the Lord
"We have become so engrossed in the work of the Lord that we have forgotten the Lord of the work."

Worship
Worship means "to feel in the heart"....Worship also means to "express in some appropriate manner" what you feel....and what will be expressed? "A humbling but delightful sense of admiring awe and astonished wonder."

"...no religion has ever been greater than its idea of God. Worship is pure or base as the worshiper entertains high or low thoughts of God."

"Men who refuse to worship the true God now worship themselves with tender devotion."

"Without doubt the emphasis in Christian teaching today should be on worship. There is little danger that we shall become merely worshipers and neglect the practical implications of the gospel. No one can long worship God in spirit and in truth before the obligation to holy service becomes too strong to resist. Fellowship with God leads straight to obedience and good works. That is the divine order and it can never be reversed."

"Worship, I say, rises or falls with our concept of God .... and if there is one terrible disease in the Church of Christ, it is that we do not see God as great as He is."

God dwells in the heart where praise is. Man is made to admire something and he admires. And when he admires to the point of incandescent white heat charged with mystery, that’s worship.

Now, worship is the missing jewel in modern evangelicalism. We’re organized; we work; we have our agendas. We have almost everything, but there’s one thing that the churches, even the gospel churches, do not have: that is the ability to worship. We are not cultivating the art of worship.